The Answer: Train Your Referral Partners in 2 Steps…

Step 1: The Johnny Carson Method

You might be old enough to remember Johnny Carson–the host of The Tonight Show before Leno, before Conan, before Fallon. Johnny had a knack for introducing people to everyone he knew.

He’d just sit them down on his couch and ask them questions…

And let 10 million people watch it all on TV.

There was never any “sales pressure” to go see a guest like Jerry Seinfeld’s comedy show after he appeared with Carson.

But lots of people did. Spending lots of money.

Johnny was the tastemaker for his audience.

Why Interviewing Your Partners is Perfect Training

Your ultimate goal is to get your partner to share you with anyone and everyone who might be a prospect for you.

But before you can get there, it helps to build some trust. Show your referral partner how to easily get you in front of everyone they know.

You do it by first “introducing” them to everyone you know, through a simple interview.

See, if your referral partner is interacting with your prospects, there’s a good chance they have some expertise or wisdom that your clients would appreciate and value.

An interview takes little time–20-30 minutes. Almost no technology–a phone and a free conference line will do. And, you don’t need anything more than a handful of questions (your partner can provide them) and the ability to have a conversation.

In an hour of your time, total, you can prove to your new referral partner how easy it is for you to share them with everyone in your network.

Just have a valuable conversation, record it, then email a link to the audio to your network of clients, and partners, and prospects.

You’ll be shocked by the feedback

When our clients use this technique the first time, they’re surprised when their own clients call and thank them for sharing the interview.

(The goodwill you create with your own clients is a bonus!)

It’s important that you pass that positive feedback to your referral partner. It’ll make them feel great about being interviewed.

It also validates the fact that people like and value this type of information sharing because…

Step 2: Now it’s time to put their training into action

Once you’ve shared how much your clients appreciated hearing your partner’s interview, with the partner, it’s the perfect time to suggest “turning the tables.”

Say…

“I’m so glad I was able to share your knowledge with my network. They really benefited. I’d like to return the favor. I think your contacts might get a lot of value from knowing more about [insert your area of expertise].

I’d love to have you interview me, so we can help your people the way we’ve helped mine.”

Nine out of ten referral partners will jump at the chance. If you happen to come across the tenth one, well…you’ve just learned a lot about that partner.

How to “control” your interview

There are three things you’ll want to do to ensure you make the most of your interview.

Write your questions. Don’t settle for a free-flow conversation, and don’t put any extra work on your partner. Write questions that, when you answer, give the listeners “ah-ha” moments.

Do all the logistic work. Again, don’t put any work on your partner. Write the cover note/email. Bring lunch to their office and offer to help them send the email while you both eat. Get creative…just don’t make it “homework” for your partner, or it’ll drop to the bottom of their to-do list.

Put a lead generation offer at the end.Doing the interview is great. But a big mistake is omitting any next-step call to action. The best offer in these interviews is to offer what I call a Referral Kit™ (an educational marketing piece).

That gets interested prospects to raise a hand and identify themselves to request your Referral Kit.

But wait, there’s more…

There’s one little hidden benefit of this process…

After you publish your first interview or two, your other partners will want in. Your opportunities just multiplied!

Here’s how to put it all together

So, we’ve covered a lot of ground. Let’s review the process…

First: Offer to interview your referral partner to share their expertise with your network. Distribute the interview to your clients, prospects, and other partners.

Second: As soon as you get positive feedback from your network, share it with your partner and “turn the tables.” Suggest they interview you to share your expertise with your partner’s network.

Rinse. Repeat.

Watch as your list of interested prospects and network of effective partners grows.

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Wed, 07 Dec 2016 14:37:14 +0000Al Gregorioshttps://algregorios.wordpress.com/2016/12/07/building-a-good-life/Building a Good Life written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Together with his team, Fields produces a top-rated podcast with millions of downloads, a video series with more than 50-million minutes viewed in over 150 countries, and offers a growing catalog of events, trainings and courses.

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

To learn more about the Good Life Project, click here. To learn more about Camp GLP, click here. To buy How to Live a Good Life: Soulful Stories, Surprising Science, and Practical Wisdom, click here.

This week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is brought to you by magicJack for BUSINESS, trusted by a quarter million small businesses. Reliable phone service at an incredible price: plans from just $14.99/month per line – flat. Get two months FREE service when you sign up at http://ift.tt/2dEnE42. The first 100 listeners will receive a FREE IP phone for every line (each an $85 value)!

In a few short years much of what you do, make, fix, sell, and ship, won’t mean much to anyone. In fact, there’s a pretty good chance that if you stay put doing whatever it is your business does right now – you’ll be out of business.

If you want to survive, let alone thrive, you must tap new trends and produce new ideas at an accelerating rate.

Robots, artificial intelligence, and technology built on top of the internet will continue to threaten the very fabric of what most business (and jobs) are set up to do today. If I’m to be totally honest, it will wipe most business and jobs as we know them today completely away.

No one was a social media manager, app developer, or drone operator (there are 70,000 of these now) ten years ago.

And in ten years there will be very few cashiers, travel agents, and social media managers (coming full circle on this one pretty quickly).

This isn’t a new idea by any means. Each technological advance has done this for decades, (think cars, email, and computers) but the difference today is that evolution has been democratized. Meaning, in the past, entire industries were regulated into stability to maintain the status quo.

Today, anyone, working in the equivalent of a digital garage, can produce an innovation that can make what you do redundant.

And, the rate of innovation is going to accelerate in ways that will catch many people off guard.

I’m not writing this to suggest doom and gloom, but I do think that any business that lacks a plan for intentional innovation – even if it means deconstructing your current revenue model – is putting their business in a risky position.

Want proof that this is coming?

Right now, there are multi-million dollar small businesses with no offices, no employees, and no debt that are capable of competing with and beating out Fortune 500 companies. They are doing this, not simply because they offer better pricing, they are doing it because they also offer better products and better processes, and deliver results with more capable people.

It’s easy to witness the impact of what I’m describing in well-known examples like, Craigslist vs. paid classified ads, Uber vs. Taxis or Airbnb vs. Hotels, but it’s also happening in obscure fields by companies you’ve never heard of unless you work in that industry.

Ironically, some of these nimble disrupters, such as Netflix, have moved into the Fortune 500.

But I’m talking about something much smaller perhaps – down to the level of beating out your closest competitors.

Name your industry, name a job or task vital to that industry, and I guarantee you that there are companies working on making that job or task irrelevant.

There are many industries in serious trouble already, but it’s only a matter of time before most seemingly profitable industries come under fire.

Where to look for your innovation

Here are a few things we know for sure

People are getting older and living longer

Some of the hottest markets right now are those in the field of medical technology and caring for aging adults.

How can your business look for innovation in this trend?

The way people pay for goods and services has forever changed

I went on a weeklong trip to a foreign country and never used cash of any currency. People expect to be able to pay, send, finance and split transactions using apps and online services.

How can your business meet this expectation?

People expect everything to be smart and convenient

Almost everyone has a smartphone these days, and they’ve gotten very used to being able to do more and more things with that device. Not only are they using apps to communicate and pay bills, but they are also turning to their smartphone to turn on lights, adjust the thermostat, monitor security.

How can your business tap into the fact that people have this powerful device with them at all times?

Companies no longer need offices or employees

As I stated in the intro above, a business is no longer a collection of people huddled in desks at a single location. Even businesses that have a physical location are finding employees using it less and less.

How can your business take advantage of this trend to run more profitably or fill the needs of companies that want and need virtual staff and freelance talent?

Millennials are fast becoming a significant buying force

Much has been written about the significant attitude shift in the generation that now makes up one of the prime buying demographics. Most members of the millennial generation are digital first when it comes to finding and engaging companies they buy from, but there’s also a strong need for connection to a brand’s story.

How can you make your brand more approachable and human while offering the convenience of digital technology?

I know that I’ve proposed more questions than answers today, but this is a topic I plan to return to repeatedly as I believe innovation is perhaps the most significant threat and greatest opportunity facing most small business today.

Innovation is a strategy that must be central to your day to day planning.

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

Airstory – Software that works the way content creators do so that you can publish more frequently, faster, and with greater accuracy.

Most people believe that getting referrals is something that just happens, that all you need to do is just turn up to networking events, do a good job with your clients or customers and be part of a referral group. This could not be further from the truth and you are leaving so much money on the table.

There are plenty of things that need to be done to get referrals, but the biggest impact and instant results come from creating your own referral teams. A referral team is a group of people that are helping you to generate new business each day. They want to help you because you want to help them, I see them as part of my sales team, but without having to pay them as a sales person.

Referral Teams

For most people ‘Referral Teams’ will be a whole new concept, however in some way you have already been doing this, but without the structure or process, we are about to put in place. My referral team is a group of people who are out there each day creating new opportunities for our business. They are opening new doors for us, giving our business new exposure, filling our sales funnels and promoting our products and services whenever they can.

Just imagine what having 66 people promoting your business every day would do for your business?

There are 5 different groups of people within our referral teams, they are all as important as one another and all play a role in generating new business for you.

Profitability Partners

First, there are Profitability Partners. This is your A team, the people who have similar networks to yourself and people you really like and trust. You can have up to 6 profitability partners, any more and you will not have the time to help them. This is a 1on1 conversation between you and your partner every week. The phone call should not last more than 10 minutes and you go through and strategize how you can help one another. Most people are lucky if they talk to their referral partners every month, let alone every week. With constant communication, constant strategizing and constantly being front of mind of one another, you will be amazed how much business you can pass each other.

Super Group

Next, there is your Super Group. Your super group is up to 8 people that come together once a month. With technologies these days you can do this face to face or via webinar, zoom or some other conferencing platform. Your super group is about all 8 people sharing their networks, sharing their clients and customers and creating new opportunities for one another. Your super group needs 8 people (including yourself) that all sell to the same type of person but sell something different. For example, a marketing person with a graphic designer with a HR consultant with an IT consultant with a web developer. They all have the same client and all sell something different.

Cross Promotion

Next is your Cross Promotion partners. Doing cross promotions is the quickest way to grow your business and it is so simple to do. A cross promotion is simply I promote someone to my network and they promote me to their network. I know to get to be in front of all these potential clients who sit in another person’s network. Doing cross-promotions could be sharing content, video’s, webinars, live presentation, pdf’s and the list goes on. To set up a cross promotion all you need to do is just ask someone that has a similar network to you if they would like to cross promote. I believe if you have 12 cross promotion partners then you can do 2 a month. Trust me that is a business changer!

Content Distributors

Next is our Content Distributors. There is no point putting up content on social media unless it is being shared into new networks by other people. Most people just ‘hope’ that someone will share their content, I ensure that people do by making them content distributors. Every month I ask people if they would be happy to share my content if I shared their content. Every month we have 20+ people sharing our podcasts, webinars, articles, video’s and that allows us to build a following and reach thousands of new people every month. This is all done through other people’s networks. If you start with 20 content distributors you will start to reach new networks, pick up new clients and customers and create a strong following.

Affiliate Partners

Finally, is our Affiliate Partners. This is the only group of partners that get paid for creating a sale for us. Every other type of partner is helping me because I’m committed to helping them. Affiliates are happy to sell your product or service for a commission when they make a sale they get paid. For most people, they don’t use this type of partnership correctly and they often fail. The key is great communication and building the relationship.

With 20 affiliates, 20 content distributors, 12 cross promotion partners, 8 in your super group and 6 profitability partners you know have a team of 66 people who are out there creating new opportunities for your business. Referral teams don’t get built overnight, you need the right sorts of people and you might have to talk to hundreds before you get the right team. I know I am always looking for people who have the same mindset and values around partnerships, who have similar networks to myself and who have the desire to help one another. Without these, your referral relationship is going to fail before it has even started.

Michael Griffiths is the #1 authority on Referral Marketing training and the founder of the Referral Authority Blueprint. Michel gets people to generate more referrals, use their networks more effectively and fill their sales funnels through partnerships. Grab you free referral resources at http://ift.tt/2fTbOQp

Are you happy now? Or simply, happy overall? As a company, you don’t just want your customer happy in this moment in time. You want them happy all of the time.

According to McKinsey & Company, evaluating a customer’s satisfaction throughout his or her entire journey with a company is 30% more predictive of overall customer satisfaction than measuring happiness based on individual interactions.

What does this mean?

Delightful customer service can’t simply be limited to solving problems, such as reacting to customers who are calling to complain their online order was never delivered or that the software they downloaded no longer works on their computer.

Creating happy and loyal customers must be the mission at each and every touch point with the brand. It’s not just reactive. It’s proactive, too.

Proactive customer service, as opposed to reactive, means delivering an efficient and helpful experience from the customer’s first interaction with the brand, whether that’s in a brick-and-mortar store, on a website or otherwise. If a customer has a positive experience from the get-go, they are more likely to be a repeat customer. In fact, engaged consumers buy 90% more often and spend 60% more per transaction (source).

So, how can your brand stop waiting and get proactive with customer service? There are a few strategies to keep in mind:

1. Make answers easy to find

According to a report from Aspect’s Cloud Solutions, one-third of customers say they’d ‘rather clean a toilet’ than speak with customer service. That’s unfortunate (and kind of gross), but it says a lot about how customers are changing. They want to find answers to their questions on their own, more and more frequently using their mobile device and by browsing a brand’s website or social channels.

Therefore, develop a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page on the website for straightforward questions, create how-to videos to teach customers best practices for using the product, create e-books providing more information on the company’s services, and, overall, make sure all content about your products and services proactively address the customers’ most common questions and concerns.

The easier (and faster!) it is to find solutions on their own, the happier the customers will be.

2. Provide accurate information

Though you might make answers easy to find on your website or your customer service representatives are always available on the phone, proactive customer service requires that your information always is up-to-date and exact.

It’s incredibly frustrating for customers to receive a response from one customer service representative, only to get a different response from another employee. Make sure that the information they’re receiving is accurate and consistent so that they don’t have to contact you again should the issue resurface (see the statistic above in #1).

3. Be honest and forthcoming

While real-time responses might be the expectation from customers, don’t sacrifice accuracy or honesty just to get an answer to them as soon as possible. Instead, let them know when they can expect a phone call or email response and that the team is working on getting a resolution for them. People can be understanding when they know they have been heard and that someone is working to find a solution. Being upfront with information and setting expectations will go a long way in making a customer feel valued and engaged.

4. Welcome customers and keep in touch

The point of proactive customer service is to build a relationship with consumers outside of when they have a problem or question. To accomplish this, brands should welcome customers and stay in touch with them via social media, email or snail mail.

To make customers feel like a part of the brand’s community, keep them up to date on new products or service offerings, as well as events being hosted by the company. Additionally, like and respond to customers’ own updates. For example, FitBit and Nike cheer on their customers via social media when they’ve accomplished a goal. Pampers, the go-to diaper supplier for millions of moms, makes relevant comments on parents’ photos. These seemingly small interactions go a long way in building a relationship with customers.

5. Keep improving

Making customers a part of a brand’s community is a two-way street. Their input and feedback must be heard, in addition to them receiving updates and news from the company. There is some great insight available by taking relevant suggestions and listening to customer chatter online.

Take, for example, a beauty company that was considering updating its formula for a best-selling face cream to change the cream’s color from blue to white. After researching online and realizing that its primary customer base called the cream “the blue stuff,” the brand ended the endeavor and instead embraced this nickname in its communication with customers.

While many people might think of customer service as only relevant when there is an issue with a product or service, proactive customer service works to go beyond those touch points. This approach can help build better relations with customers, increase communication with them should there ever be a problem, and make them feel like a valued part of a brand’s community.

I’m back at it again with another episode featuring a copywriter who just happens to think that effective storytelling is effective copywriting.

My guest for this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Joanna Wiebe. Wiebe is co-founder of Copy Hackers, a website dedicated to helping marketers boost website and email conversion rates. She is also co-founder of Airstory, where she helps writers write better and faster. She and I talk about the art of copywriting and how it can be used to increase engagement.

Wiebe is the original conversion copywriter. She helps startups use their words so people fall in love with them, flood them in cash, and tell all their friends about them. Wiebe can be found speaking at numerous conferences, helping top businesses optimize their copy and working with researchers to test “wild ‘n’ crazy ideas.”

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

Learn more about Joanna Wiebe and Copy Hackers here. To learn more about Airstory, click here.

This week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is brought to you by magicJack for BUSINESS, trusted by a quarter million small businesses. Reliable phone service at an incredible price: plans from just $14.99/month per line – flat. Get two months FREE service when you sign up at http://ift.tt/2dEnE42. The first 100 listeners will receive a FREE IP phone for every line (each an $85 value)!

You make a product, hone your pitch and then get busy prescribing the benefits of your tools to anyone who’ll listen.

That’s the way it works. You know what people need, and you tailor your solutions to meet what they need. You even give your unique methodology a fancy name and construct branded processes to deliver results.

Then one day you conclude that sales aren’t what you had hoped. That sometimes when you recommend work your proposals go nowhere.

Fear not, I’m about to give you a dose of reality. Get what I’m about to share, and you’ll start writing, selling, and proposing in an entirely new way.

Hold on, though, as I’m about to shatter your world view – but I’ll do it as gently as possible.

Here it is.

Very few people want what you sell.

That’s not a knock on you or your business or your solutions. I’m sure all are amazing.

What people buy

But what you must realize is that there are only a few things people actually want, and unless you sell food or sex you’ll have to figure this one out.

People don’t want what you sell – they want what they believe they will get, achieve, relieve, dodge, or acquire based on buying what you sell.

So, your job as a marketer is to understand the problems people are trying to solve and match your solutions to those very specific problems.

What are your best customers saying to themselves when they get up in the morning?

I sell marketing consulting services, and I guarantee you that very few people who eventually engage our services wake and utter, “you know what I wish I had, some marketing consulting.”

But they might say something like, “why don’t my customers refer me to their friends?” or “why do I keep losing projects to Acme Consulting?”

Creating trigger phrases

In the past, I’ve referred to these kinds of statements as trigger phrases.

Your customers don’t know how to solve their problems, but they usually know what their problems are. If you can get really good at demonstrating that what you sell is the answer to their problem they really won’t care what you call it, they’ll just buy it to make the pain go away.
If the pain is big enough, you may have to put out the fire before they will even consider the comprehensive solution you know they truly need.

Take some time and break down every solution you sell, every benefit you attribute to what you do, and map it back to a handful of “trigger phrases.”

These phrases can be questions or statements or even anecdotes, but they must come from the point of view of the customer.

In my book The Referral Engine, I advise creating a one-page tool that you can share with your referral sources. The idea is to create a cheat sheet of trigger phrases that signal that the person saying them needs your service.

So, for example, if you sell accounting services to small businesses a trigger statement might be, “I can never get a handle on my receivables.”

That’s a real problem that your accounting solution can cure.

Problem-solving as strategy

Frankly, creating a list of trigger statements should be very high on your strategic list.

People aren’t searching for your solutions, but they search every single day for ways to address problems they see and feel.

Marketers that build their content, web design and SEO practices around problem solving will intersect their ideal client’s buying journey at a much earlier point – the point at which you can do the kind of trust building that makes your solution the obvious choice.

Google the phrase – “problems we solve” and you’ll see that some marketers are building web pages with this very idea at the center of their content strategy.

So the next time you see a marketing consultant selling a “reputation management” solution, know that no one wants that – what they want is to make the one-star review go away. I’m a marketing consultant, so I sell the “we can make the one-star review go away service.”

Make sense?

For illustration purposes, I’ll outline my entire problems vs. solutions map. If you’re a marketing consultant, then this will make total sense to you, and you should probably look into becoming a member of the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network.

If you own or market for any other type of business you’ll have to do the work to create this map for your business based on brainstorming with your staff, the questions you find in forums, and through some planned, quality one on one time with your existing customers.

I’ve formatted these as questions, but you can see how they could just as easily be formatted as statements.

I’ve broken what we do into the logical chunks of the Duct Tape Marketing System.

Vision

Vision problems

Have you lost or never found the passion for your business?

Do you feel like you’re drifting without any real plan?

Do you feel a lack of clarity and control in your marketing efforts?

Vision solutions

Do you have a good sense of why you do what you do?

Do you have a vision for your business one year from today?

Do you have a revenue goal for one year from today?

Strategy

Strategy problems

Do you feel like you’re trying to sell to anyone and everyone?

Do you feel like your business is a commodity?

Is price always and issue with your clients?

Do you seem to be attracting the wrong types of clients?

Are you struggling to stand out from your competitors?

Strategy solutions

Do you have clients or customers currently?

Do you know who makes an ideal client for your business?

Do you have a unique message that answers “why you?”

Do you know the greatest problems your clients face?

Do you have graphic elements (logo) that appeal to your ideal client?

Do you have a complete view of your competitive landscape?

Local Online Presence

Local presence problems

Do you feel like you’re getting left behind in the ever-changing online world?

Do you feel like your website isn’t performing as you had hoped?

Do you wonder why your competitors show up for local searches and your business does not?

Are you weary of the constant pitches from SEO companies?

Do you find the need to produce content and participate in every social network exhausting?

Online presence solutions

Have you ever had a different business name, address or phone number then you have today?

Do you have a Google My Business Page?

Do you have a marketing based website?

Do you publish articles/blog posts regularly?

Are you using and SEO plugin (WordPress)

Are you familiar with “schema” location mark-up?

Do you have a plan to acquire reviews from customers?

Do you have a way to capture leads/emails on your website?

Do you have profiles on major social networks?

Content

Content problems

Do you wonder why anyone would want to read blog posts about your business?

Do you feel like your website homepage is cluttered and confusing?

Do you feel stressed out by the idea that you are being asked to produce more content with less time?

Do you feel like you have no idea what to write about?

Does is seem like no one else in your industry is blogging?

Content solutions

Do you know the most important keyword search phrases used by your ideal client to find businesses like yours?

Does your website home page promote a clear and simple message about why people should hire/buy from you?

Do you have local content such as blog posts about events, client stories in neighborhoods where you work, etc.?

Do you have a blog or other way to consistently publish new content?

Do you have any written customer success stories?

Do you create any video content?

Do you publish an email newsletter?

Offline presence

Offline problems

Do you sometimes feel like a dinosaur because you like real books and brochures and in person meetings?

Do you sense that some of your marketing tactics are outdated in today’s online world?

Offline solutions

Do you have a suite of printed or downloadable education materials?

Do you have an automated way for people to make appointments with you?

Lead generation

Lead generation problems

Do you feel like you’re simply guessing at how to generate leads?

Do you wonder what it would take to consistently generate the right leads?

Do you sometimes feel your wasting money on ineffective lead generation tactics

Do you feel like you’re flying in the dark when it comes to choosing the right lead generation tactics?

Do you find the technical aspects of online advertising a bit intimidating?

Lead generation solutions

Do you know the best place or way to generate leads for your business?

Do you have a way to attract ideal client leads who want to know more?

Do you have a way to follow up with leads?

Lead conversion

Lead conversion problems

Do you hate the thought of selling?

Do you find it difficult to get in front of the right prospects?

Do you spend way too much time chasing meetings, proposals, and deals?

Do you sometimes drop the ball when it comes to getting a new client started?

Do you get frustrated that sometimes clients leave as fast as you can generate new ones

Lead conversion solutions

Do you have a consistent way to respond to leads?

Do you have a set way to present what you do to prospects?

Do you have a way to nurture leads before they convert?

Do you need a proposal process for your type of business?

Do you have a process to orient new customers?

Do you have a process to reactivate dormant customers?

Tracking

Tracking problems

Do you ever wonder what’s working and what’s not?

Do you struggle with confidently know where to invest your limited marketing budget?

Do you sometimes feel like you are simply responding to the marketing idea of the week rather than working a plan?

Do you find it very difficult to measure the return on your marketing and time investment in your business?

Tracking solutions

Website analytics

Do you have Google Analytics installed on your website

Do you have Google Search Console integrated with your site

Do you have any Google Analytics Goals created to track website conversions?

Do you use call tracking tools on your website?

Key performance indicators

Do you know the key indicators of success in your business?

Do you set and track revenue and customer goals?

Do you track leads generated?

Do you track leads converted?

Do you know the cost to acquire a new customer?

Okay, your turn. Demonstrate that you understand the problems and you’ll get the opportunity to pitch your solutions.

When you work in a small marketing department with a shoestring budget, you’re often faced with the dilemma of paying for automation or investing hours in managing the work internally.

Through my years in various marketing roles, I’ve gotten lucky and also learned the hard way about which processes should and should not be automated. The takeaway: growth has to be achieved through a various mix of human power and automated tools.

My team manages our work by being clear about what we do by hand, what’s better managed by the host of marketing tools at our disposal, and then reviewing our decisions when we reset our goals.

So, here’s the skinny.

Email: 100% Automate

The only thing you, as a marketer, should be focused on is getting the most out of each channel you’re using. Email is no different. If you have more than 100 customers, you should be automating your transactional and marketing emails.

Writing email copy and subject lines and testing their relative effectiveness at every turn improves ROI, the mundane admin work behind running these campaigns does not.

Mail providers will handle all of your A/B testing, email design, delivery time optimization and opt-outs. Additionally, most of the players in the game today offer user-event based segmentation, which is a necessity for companies doing growth hacking.

My advice is to research email providers and find one that is going to fit your needs as you continue to grow, and don’t be shy about switching up providers when necessary. I’ve also found that email providers are willing to bargain with you over price a little more than other marketing SaaS companies.

For the price and feature offering, I’ve always been fond of Customer.io. They make the process of setting up automatically triggered transactional emails simple and without the need for back-end logic. I also really like Customer.io’s reliance on a template-based system for email creation, which makes collaboration easier. The dashboard doesn’t stink either.

Press: Keep it Human

One thing I cannot stress enough is the importance of getting a rock star PR person on your team.

Securing local and national press coverage for your product or service should be a top priority for your growth strategy. Besides the cost of a press manager’s salary, getting media mentions is a low-cost acquisition channel that can have a huge return.

Outsourcing media relations to an agency or paying a press distribution service will not cut it. The news cycle is too fast and media too annoyed with incoming press releases that stink. You need someone in-house who knows your business like the back of their hand and is eager to craft media pitches to get featured, preferably someone who understands the pressures of reporting and small outlets.

I’ve seen a single national press mention bring in the same amount of sales in one day that general marketing efforts bring in a month.

Invest in an eager, savvy, connected person to lead your press outreach efforts and I guarantee you won’t be disappointed. It’s like Christmas when a big mention lands and you start seeing the site traffic spike.

Customer Persona Building and Target Customer Research – Automate Data Collection and Analyze with Humans

In addition to growing the business, it’s also the marketing team’s job to know whom you should be selling to in the first place.

One of the best ways to determine whom you should be targeting is by talking with already satisfied customers, and recent cancellations.

If you work for a SaaS company or sell online, you’re in the lucky group because you most likely have an email address and possibly phone numbers for customers. If you know how to get in contact with your customers, you can schedule interviews with them and also perform net promoter score surveys.

Here, I recommend using tools to collect information and then pass it to your team, who follow up. Basically, the team needs the direct insight from the customer. Interviewing allows you to hear how customers describe your product and what words they use- hello AdWords keywords.

If you outsource the interviews, you’re missing out on valuable customer insights.

If you sell through retailers, or not directly to customers, collecting contact info and building relationships with them is much more difficult.

Services like BrandLoop help companies connect with their customers who do not buy directly. They make product registrations mobile and allow customers to use Facebook single-sign-on to register their purchases. This helps retailers open another communication channel with their customers they didn’t have before.

Analytics – Outsource Measurement, Assess with Human Rigor

Sure, I like a good spreadsheet, but pulling all the data I need from Google Analytics and Mixpanel, that’s not the best use of my time. Still, I need accurate, updated customer segments, monthly recurring revenue, conversion rates, unique traffic figures and more.

Thanks to the marvels of marketing tools, I don’t have to, so I don’t. Yes, some of these services will require a little Javascript, but they’ll save you hours once they’re deployed.

Next, it’s up to your team to determine what all that data means for your funnel.

Don’t forget that the suite of metrics you’re collecting should include an absolute quantity and a rate to ensure you hit your goals.

About the Author

Mike Hourigan is the Director of Marketing for Shoeboxed, a receipt digitization company used by over one million small businesses worldwide. He also serves as a digital marketing consultant and advisor. Mike is a die-hard UNC Tar Heel fan and a sucker for good documentaries.

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

Process Street – Process Street is a free and powerful way to create, track and optimize business process workflows with ease.

As evidenced by the CMI study, many small business owners and marketing practitioners are laser-focused on new lead generation through content creation, digital marketing, conversion rate optimization and the like. But the unintended consequence of our collective lead generation obsession is that the task of actually determining which of the leads generated are sales-ready is relegated to the back-burner. That ultimately results in sales teams being sent troves of contacts who are either unable or not ready to buy.

Lead quantity vs. lead quality

Regardless of your company’s size or industry, focusing on lead quantity over quality is almost always a mistake for the simple reason that the intermediate result (increased lead generation) isn’t properly aligned with the ultimate business goal (gaining new customers).

Often, this is a product of the “quantity drives quality” line of reasoning – the higher the volume of leads generated, the more likely it is that some of them will be “good.” Of course, this is (1) not necessarily true, (2) sets the stage for a massive waste of sales resources and (3) usually results in the “good” leads being squandered along with the “bad” ones.

Behavior Scoring = evaluating a lead based on the observed activities and behaviors of the individual across multiple channels (attending a webinar, viewing an RFP, downloading a thought leadership piece, scheduling a call with Sales, etc.)

Hybrid = uses both Profiling & Behavioral Scoring to assess the viability of each lead

The important thing to note from the definition above is that lead scoring measures that value of a lead to your company. The individual behaviors recorded and data points assessed will differ from company to company and industry to industry – but the result is a consistent, data-driven framework for prioritizing and segmenting all of those leads generated by your content and marketing initiatives.

For your sales team, a well-designed lead scoring program means pre-qualified, high-potential leads on which to focus all of their efforts; your marketing team gains audience segments that can be nurtured through automated programs until they are sales-ready, and an increased understanding of which types of content are effective at driving/nurturing leads (along with which ones are simply ineffective); finally, your company profits from higher close rates, fewer leads lost and increased sales productivity.

How Lead Scoring Increases Marketing ROI & Sales Productivity

The goal of a lead scoring program is to provide a data-driven framework to evaluate leads through the lens of your business – after all, what good is done by having sales call a lead who can’t afford your product or who works in an industry you don’t serve?

Each lead passed onto sales comes with a price tag: not only is the salesperson’s time valuable, but each bad lead has a pair of hidden opportunity costs: (1) it takes away from the time that sales can spend building a relationship with the “good” leads and (2) trying to sell leads before they are ready to buy often alienates them – resulting in the loss of a potential future customer and a sunk lead acquisition cost.

It’s important to note that a lead generation program is not a panacea to bad marketing and lackluster salespeople; it’s a tool to be used as part of a broader new business strategy. When used appropriately, it will help your organization increase revenue, cut unnecessary expenditures and deliver better customer experiences by:

enabling you to see what content, tactics, and channels are driving qualified leads;

ensuring that you are appropriately “segmenting” leads generated based on their sales readiness

focusing your sales team’s time and effort on those leads that are qualified

creating a personalized user experience for each lead based on their interests, behaviors, and readiness to make a purchase

providing a mechanism to continuously re-engage those leads who aren’t sales ready in a productive manner

Getting Started: The Next Steps To Implement A Lead Scoring Program

Many companies I’ve worked with have had the same reaction when the topic of lead scoring is discussed: “That sounds complex and expensive.”

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

The first step to creating a successful lead scoring program is bringing together your executive leadership, marketing team and sales staff to sketch your ideal buyer persona(s), behavior(s) and customer journey(s). This need not be an exhaustive, in-depth process (although if you are interested, Marketo provides an excellent guide) – start by reviewing your business offerings and past sales. Some key questions to consider for creating your target buyer profile:

Who is an ideal customer for us (industry, company size, revenue, etc.)?

Where are our ideal customers located?

How long is the sales cycle for an ideal customer (week, month, year, etc.)?

Who are the decision makers at an ideal customer (CEO, VP, Director, Manager, etc.)?

Where in the buying cycle is this lead (timeline)?

While that may sound like a lot of information to gather in a simple lead form, the good news is that many companies provide accurate data appending services – so you need only ask a few questions (Name, Title, Company, E-mail) on the form; the rest of the blanks can often be completed by the data appending company. Given that forms with fewer fields tend to result in higher submission rates and more accurate information, it’s usually safe to say that an appending service will pay for itself.

The above questions provide key insights into your ideal buyer – the next critical piece is determining which behaviors indicate that your buyer is “ready to buy.” Assuming you’ve configured your analytics goals, you can often see what behaviors drive goal completions; from your CRM, you should be able to track which goal completions ultimately resulted in sales.

Working backward from converted leads (i.e. leads that became customers), examine the individual goal completion paths. Look for what pages on your website those individuals tended to visit. Did they view a product demonstration, request a free trial, sign up for an account, download a whitepaper, watch a webinar or visit a services page? Identify those pages that frequently appear in the journey of your customers – and assign each a value just as you would for an analytics goal value.

Finally – and this is critical – make sure you assign “negative” values for behaviors and profiles that indicate the prospect is not legitimate or interested. This might include: having a title like “student” or “intern”, unsubscribing from your e-mail newsletter, cancelling a free account, visiting to a “Careers” page or not not opening more than X e-mails – this helps to filter out “false positives” and ensure that you are delivering the best leads to your sales team.

Once you’ve completed the above steps, determine an appropriate threshold value for “profile” scores and “behavior” scores – those above that level are “sales-ready”; those below can be placed into a lead nurturing program. Keep in mind that your lead scoring program can be as complex as you would like it to be – you can have seven different “threshold” values for both profile and behavioral scores, along with a customized path for all 49 different customer types. You can have multiple buyer personas. It’s your lead generation program.

As you are going through this process (and often, it takes companies less than 2 hours to complete once everyone is in the room), remember that the goal is to begin to foster alignment and secure buy-in from everyone involved. This approach works because it aligns everyone’s efforts – and that’s only possible if everyone is bought in and willing to do their part.

Once you’ve outlined your program and how you’d like to score each lead, find a platform that can implement what you want to do – too many companies find a vendor first, then are frustrated that the scores they want simply aren’t possible with the out-of-the-box versions of the software provided.

First understand what you want to measure as part of your lead scoring program, then find a partner with the technology to help you do it. This same approach whether you’re a small family business or a large corporation – and there are solutions out there for any budget. As an example, Saleswings start at just $11 per month and InfusionSoft provides an all-in-one CRM for just $199 per month.

In the end, remember that lead scoring is essential if you want to get the most out of your marketing initiatives and sales team. While it may seem daunting, there are hundreds of web resources to help you through the process.

Sam Ruchlewicz is the resident data expert and Senior Digital Strategist for Warschawski, a Baltimore-based Advertising, Marketing & PR Agency. He’s successfully helped companies across the B2B, B2C & B2G spaces use their data to overcome their marketing and customer acquisition challenges – and is always willing to help. Drop him a note here.

So here’s the big question – you started a business, so do you own a business or did you create a hard, sometimes low-paying job?

To me, the big distinction lies in your ability to successfully scale and get free from the daily demands of the business.

Many businesses, even seemingly successful ones, plateau at the point where the owner can no longer keep their arms wrapped around every element of the business – the rainmaking, client serving, and financial controls either outgrow them or bury them.

If you want the short version – it’s systems, my friend. They will set you free!

Finkel is an ex-Olympic level athlete turned serial entrepreneur and best-selling author. You could say he knows a thing or two about successfully growing a business. Over the past 20 years, Finkel and the other Maui coaches and advisors have personally started and scaled companies with an aggregate value of $63 billion. His weekly business owner e-letter is read by 100,000 business owners around the world and his syndicated business articles on Inc and the Huffington Post garner over 150,000 readers every year.

Questions I ask David Finkel:

What holds people back from scaling?

How can people figure out their priorities?

How can people free up time to get things done?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

How having a vision can help you grow your business

How to build an owner-independent business

What four core systems you need to master to scale your business

Learn more about David Finkel and Maui Mastermind here. To buy Scale: Seven Proven Principles to Grow Your Business and Get Your Life Back, click here. Get your free copy of Build a Business, Not a Jobhere.

This week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is brought to you by magicJack for BUSINESS, trusted by a quarter million small businesses. Reliable phone service at an incredible price: plans from just $14.99/month per line – flat. Get two months FREE service when you sign up at http://ift.tt/2dEnE42. The first 100 listeners will receive a FREE IP phone for every line (each an $85 value)!

There’s a lot of recent chatter about the Google My Business page, linked to Google+, going away, but for now it’s still vital data that feeds to Google Maps and even in some of the exploratory versions people see in the wild, things like reviews on your Google My Business page are going to continue to be a ranking factor.

The presence of the Google Maps data in mobile searches makes this element increasingly important for most local businesses. I have a client in the home services industry that receives 66% of their current traffic on mobile devices and tablets.

ComScore recently found that 78 percent of local-mobile searches resulted in an immediate offline purchase.

You really can’t even dream about showing up for local searches unless you claim and Optimize Your Google My Business page first.

A little Google My Business housekeeping

There’s a good chance you have a Google My Business page, even if you don’t remember setting it up.

If you aren’t sure if you have a Google My Business page you can go here to check it out – http://ift.tt/1s2GC0K

Another issue you might want to work through is that some business owners have inadvertently set up multiple Google My Business pages and have a bit of a mess to unwind – Here’s a tool to check if you have multiple pages – http://ift.tt/1wbcymd

If you find that you have duplicate listings, you may be able to merge them by following these instructions – http://ift.tt/2gysz8F

Last but not least, we’ve found that the best (sometimes only) way to interact with Google My Business is via Twitter – that’s right – put your questions and requests in here: https://twitter.com/GoogleSmallBiz

Okay, sorry for all that housekeeping, it’s just we’ve seen how tangled this one can get and fixing it is a big deal.

Some more advanced options

There are other ways to optimize this important element, but make certain you have the ones above covered.

Update images with fresh, hi-resolution images. Google will compress them as needed, but they will look much better. You can and should feature hi-res logo, exterior shots, interior shots, staff and behind the scenes work. Here’s a detailed guide to images from Google.

If you have questions about your Google My Business Page or need some help unwinding some not so ideal set-up you might consider checking out our Local Foundation Service.

Although most of what it takes to rank locally isn’t that complex, sometimes it makes sense to get a pro involved. After all, optimizing directory profiles might not be the best use of your time.

We created the Local Foundation Package as a complete and ongoing “done for you” marketing service so you can rest assured all of these more technical local ranking factors are taken care in just the right manner.

Either way, if you keep chugging along with these tips pretty soon when someone says “Google that” they’ll find your business.

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

You’ve probably run into this pop-up form more than a few times. And more than a few times, you’ve politely declined the offer.

After all, why would you subscribe? You have enough spam and useless rubbish in your inbox, even without (yet another) newsletter.

This is how your reader feels. They will hesitate to part with their email address without good reason.

But what if your visitor wouldn’t hesitate?

What if you could make your sign-up proposal irresistible? Imagine your visitor jumping at the mere chance subscribing.

Your list would be full of people desperate to get more of your content.

You CAN do it. All you need to do is provide value in exchange.

And that’s where so many people fail…

Is Your Lead Magnet Worthless?

Any blog or website wanting to grow their mailing list needs a lead magnet.

While most websites offer an incentive for subscribing, they rarely do it properly. Most lead magnets you see out there are completely worthless:

They rehash old information.

They make false promises.

They’re simply irrelevant to the visitor.

Your visitor is looking for information and value. If they find a lead magnet that doesn’t really promise a solution to something they’re struggling with, they will simply gloss over it and move on.

Some websites try to lure people into subscribing by making wild claims about the benefits their lead magnets will provide.

Don’t do that.

If your user subscribes in the hopes of receiving something truly amazing, only to be let down by a depressingly average lead magnet, they’re gone.

Gone and severely disappointed.

The first impression of your website must be positive. It’s the one that your visitor will remember. The key is to offer an amazing lead magnet:

It must provide one incredibly useful solution to one incredibly annoying problem.

It needs no explaining and is quickly applied by your reader.

It’s consistent with your overall message.

Creating an effective lead magnet is not difficult.

However, to make it memorable, you need a sprinkle of creativity.

5 Examples of Brilliant Lead Magnets

Let’s take a look at some examples of lead magnets that are creative, clever and absolutely irresistible.

1. The Entertaining Quiz

If your day is spent working online, you’ll love small bits of entertainment. A hilarious cat pic, a stupid (but hilarious) meme, or a brilliant quiz can provide a much needed few smiles to lighten up your day.

The quiz at “The One Question” isn’t just light entertainment. It promises to help you find the purpose in your life. That’s a hefty claim, but wouldn’t you like to see what happens?

If you do, you’ll find a well-crafted quiz that perhaps doesn’t reveal your life purpose, but definitely, raises some interesting questions.

Offer Value

You don’t need to offer a boring and worthless incentive. Make your visitor cherish their subscription from the moment they sign up.

Make it memorable. Whether it be a quiz, a challenge or even an extensive report, make sure your visitor will remember it.

Every opt-in offer you create needs a great landing page. You can design your own landing pages in minutes with our RAPID method.

Jay Pitkänen is passionate about copywriting, inbound marketing and turning marketing jargon into something humans can understand. When he isn’t waxing lyrical about conversion optimization on theThrive Themes blog, you can find him roaming the streets of major European cities looking for business opportunities.

Viveka knows all about online networking. Internationally recognized as the “LinkedIn Expert,” Viveka has made a career out of teaching people how to make social media networking work for them. She is a respected marketing influencer with a network of over 42 million people on LinkedIn and 82,000+ followers on Twitter.

Questions I ask Viveka von Rosen:

What’s the most effective way to use content to generate interest on LinkedIn?

Is there a way to game the system to get more exposure?

Are LinkedIn groups and LinkedIn advertising worth your time?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

Why it’s important to build your personal brand on LinkedIn

What tips and tricks work best when creating a compelling LinkedIn profile

How to effectively engage and connect with people

Learn more about Viveka von Rosen and Linked Into Business here. To buy LinkedIn: 101 Ways to Rock Your Personal Brand, click here.

This week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is brought to you by magicJack for BUSINESS, trusted by a quarter million small businesses. Reliable phone service at an incredible price: plans from just $14.99/month per line – flat. Get two months FREE service when you sign up at http://ift.tt/2dEnE42. The first 100 listeners will receive a FREE IP phone for every line (each an $85 value)!

A staple of your marketing strategy, lead generation can help stir up additional interest in your products and services. Companies of all sizes can and do benefit from implementing multi-channel efforts to boost website leads, from an email newsletter to social media and more. But website lead generation doesn’t need to rely exclusively on online channels to be effective. With a balance of both web and in-person strategies, you will gain leads in places you may not have thought to look.

1. Take your pitch on tour

Find some events where you can come in as a speaker to talk about your areas of expertise. Conferences are great venues for this, as the attendees tend to be on the wealthier side and are open to new ideas. And while you probably won’t be pitching your products and services directly, you can negotiate terms with the event organizers. For example, ask them if you can get your business listed as a sponsor rather than receive a personal speaking fee. Of course, you may need to speak for free, to begin with, as you build up your speaking reputation.

2. Give your audience a voice

Make your social media followers more excited about your business by asking them to contribute to the conversation. Asking a question is one of the best ways to facilitate this kind of engagement. For example, you could ask your followers if there are retailers where they’d like to see your products made available. This kind of question would inspire your followers to go to your website to first see what products you carry before they make suggestions. It also does wonders to build personal relationships with your followers, as you ask for their ideas, respond to them (in a timely way!), and follow through on getting your products into more retail establishments.

3. Reach out to brand influencers

Brand influencers typically gather their subscribers through social media outlets like blogging or video blogging. While viewers are aware that some product promotions are sponsored, they also tend to feel a bond of trust with the influencer. They trust that they would not be pitched an item if the blogger didn’t truly think it was worth it, which is often true. But before you begin cold-emailing every blogger under the sun, take the time to learn about their niche market and determine if your brands and values align with theirs. Then develop a strategy to reach out to them.

4. Spruce up your email signature

This technique will take you a few minutes upfront, but from then on won’t cost you a second. Simply set up your default email signature to direct them to your site. Here’s an easy example (without images, but feel free to add one!):

Best,

Sally Sanders

CEO & Founder, <Company name here>

<Company website URL here>

5. Broaden your networking

If you’ve been networking within the same circles over and over again, you may not be reaching as many new leads as you could be. Consider joining some national groups, larger online communities, or hit up a networking event the next time you travel. Don’t forget to add some variety to your contributions as well. It’s okay to tell people about your company, but your peers will also appreciate the advice, resources, and a genuine interest in their businesses from a fellow small business owner.

6. Go looking for questions to answer

Check out some of the more heavily trafficked general question forums like Quora. Look for questions that you and your company can help to answer. Some forums will allow you to link back to resources, which will give you an opportunity to plug your website. But be careful to make it genuine, helpful, and relevant to the question. Otherwise, such a blatant advertising plug may deter leads.

7. Offer incentives

Incentives are an effective draw to any website. Promoting elements like sales, scarcity, or limited time deals can spur some immediate leads. Use your email newsletter and social media to draw leads in, but also remember to add a welcome message (some use pop-up messages) to your website when the visitor initially arrives. This will make the sale obvious and/or provide them with the necessary code to access it at checkout.

As a small business owner, I recognize that you’ve probably got a lot on your plate already. So if taking on a full-scale digital marketing plan doesn’t fit into your schedule, it may be worth it to hire an assistant to help get it started. The help will pay for itself as you generate new leads and therefore new purchases. Of course, you can also wait until a few techniques have given your company more growth before bringing in a marketing assistant or full team. Either way, by incorporating the above tips into practice, you’re surely set for success.

Sophia Mest is a Content Manager at BizDb, where she aspires to put her writing passion into practice and spread her words across the world. She spends her free time traveling and exploring the wonders of nature. Follow her on Twitter @MestSophia

When it comes to online marketing, there’s a lot to keep up with. What messages should you send via email? Who is interacting with your social media pages? What are prospects looking for when they visit your website?

One way to keep up with all of your marketing channels and messaging is to use marketing automation. But that takes a little more than simply buying the right software and blasting your list with messages.

Done correctly, successful marketing automation will increase your number of leads and conversions. In a VentureBeat survey of over 700 marketers, 80 percent of marketing automation users saw their number of leads increase, and 77 percent saw their number of conversions increase. If you’re looking for that kind of success, keep these tips in mind.

1. Get your lists in order.

List management is crucial to marketing automation success. You’ll need a big list, but that doesn’t mean you should go out and buy a bunch of contacts wholesale. Reaching out to a cold list can come across as awkward and misdirected, especially at the beginning of a sales cycle.

Take the time to build your list organically through your website, social media pages and other marketing efforts. If you do buy leads, make sure they’re qualified. Here are some other list management best practices:

Once your list is clean, start segmenting. MailChimp found that segmentation can lead to a 15 percent higher open rate 59 percent higher click rate. The way you segment your list will depend on your industry and buying personas. You might want to consider a position in the sales cycle, geography, interests, age, gender, industry, etc.

Make sure people aren’t being duplicated on multiple lists and, thus, receiving too many messages.

2. Get your content right.

Invest in good content that engages your target prospects and calls for action at the right moment. Remember there’s a difference between well-written content and content that performs well. A few things that can help you succeed:

Know your audience and tailor your content appropriately.

Understand the value your product or service offers.

Create a messaging strategy for your different lead segments at every stage of the sales funnel (this would include welcome emails, follow-up messages, thank-yous, special offers, and more)

Take full advantage of marketing automation (for SEO, lead capture forms, landing pages, reporting) to develop a content strategy that speaks to your leads.

3. Have a lead generation strategy.

If you already have a lead gen strategy, prepare to automate it. If your process isn’t established yet, start by determining how you’ll drive traffic into your sales funnel. This is another area where content will come into play. Depending on your industry, you can offer various content assets (research reports, whitepapers, e-books) in exchange for contact information.

You can use all types of content to find out who people are and what they are looking for, then move them through your sales cycle. In-person events, online tools, webinars, and marketing partnerships can also be great ways to generate leads. All of these steps can be automated — to a degree — with the right software tools, which means you can scale up.

4. Establish goals and expectations.

Although your marketing team is probably singing the praises of marketing automation, it’s important to know that it won’t solve all your problems. When done correctly, automated marketing will expand your reach to more leads and convert more leads to customers, but you have to establish your goals and create a strategy in order to make that happen.

While you’re at it, make sure you get buy-in from your business leaders and executives and communicate clearly to them. One study indicates that only eight percent of companies see increased revenues within six months of adopting marketing automation. But after just one year, 32 percent see increased revenue, and after two years, that figure climbs to 40 percent.

It might take a while to see ROI from marketing automation, but the rewards are steep for those who endure. According to a 2014 report by Aberdeen, companies using marketing automation achieve 53 percent higher conversion rates than non-users, plus an annual revenue growth rate 3.1 percent higher than non-users.

5. Go all in.

Whether you’re brand new to marketing automation or you’ve been using some of these tactics for a while, it’s a good idea to think through your efforts and make changes, where necessary.

Buying marketing automation software won’t solve all your problems. You have to put people, content, and processes in place to make the whole strategy work. Set goals, create a plan, and shore up your lists before you purchase any software. Otherwise, you might not get what you pay for.

Megan Pacella is a contributor for TechnologyAdvice.com, with specializations in B2B marketing and sales. She has also written for USA Today, Bearings Guide, 10Best Nashville, and other publications.

Ok, so maybe the title of this post is a little bold, but in this episode, I talk mostly about podcasting with one of the most prolific podcasters on the planet.

If you’re a longtime reader you know that I think podcasting is an amazing tool for lead generation as well as audience building.

My guest for this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is John Lee Dumas. John is is the founder and host of the award-winning podcast EOFire, where he interviews successful entrepreneurs seven days a week. He is also the author of The Freedom Journal, a hard-cover journal that helps guides you to accomplishing your #1 goal in 100 days. As you may have guessed from the title and this introduction, John and I talk about podcasting.

John wasn’t always a podcasting phenomenon. The day he graduated from college, John joined the Army and served our country for 7 years before attending law school. After deciding law school wasn’t the right fit, he ventured into the corporate world and lived in Boston, New York and San Diego – where he discovered podcasting. Fast-forward to today, John has over 1 million monthly listeners.

Questions I ask John Lee Dumas:

Is there anything new in the world of podcasting that people should be paying attention to?

What does your process look like once you’ve finished recording an episode?

What are your thoughts on the hype around live video?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

Why choosing a niche is critical for a successful podcast

What tools are recommended for podcast production and post-production

The importance of goal setting and how to accomplish these goals

Learn more about John Lee Dumas and Entrepreneur on Fire here. To buy The Freedom Journal, click here.

This week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is brought to you by magicJack for BUSINESS, trusted by a quarter million small businesses. Reliable phone service at an incredible price: plans from just $14.99/month per line – flat. Get two months FREE service when you sign up at http://magicjackforbusiness.com/ducttape. The first 100 listeners will receive a FREE IP phone for every line (each an $85 value)!

This past month I was able to experience community in its most potent sense on two separate occasions, and I came away with an important insight about building community.

Marketers today realize that a vibrant, engaged, loyal community is perhaps the greatest asset a brand can possess and often leads to an extremely profitable enterprise – whether that’s the intent of the organization or not.

The challenge is that the kind of community described above doesn’t appear through some magic marketing trick – building a strong community around your brand is difficult, elusive, and fragile.

In fact, most people that achieve this goal can’t tell you how they do it, but I think I may have unlocked a starting point.

I belong to many strong communities, but there are three I would like to share to illustrate what I’ve witnessed as the key element of successful community building.

Warning: This is also a bit of an open love letter to some very dear friends.

World Domination Summit

I had the great honor of presenting to this group during its annual conference of 3000+ attendees, and it’s as unique a speaking experience as I’ve ever had. The principles of the community are Community, Adventure, and Service and its members are some of the most engaged, truth-seeking, entrepreneurs I’ve ever met.

The conference sells out every year well in advance, and while plenty goes on during the main stage presentations, hundreds of mini-conferences happen in coffee shops and parks all week long. People want to be a part of this community to see what they can contribute; it’s a pretty remarkable thing.

Pamely

This one isn’t so much a community as it is a force. Pam Slim has one of the most committed communities of friends and family I’ve ever encountered and yet the only real formal element of this structure is that you be an open, caring, loving, giving person – these are not her rules, these are who she is, and it attracts like a beacon.

Friends kiddingly suggest that as soon as you get to know her, you become a member of the “Pamely.”

Pam recently contributed to the conference of my network of Duct Tape Marketing Consultants by hosting a pre-conference day at her new entrepreneurial space in Mesa called K’é and introducing us to and arranging for several other amazing presenters such as Susan Baier, Skip Miller, and Park Howell.

She is the ultimate connector, and people know that if she connects you with someone, they will honor that connection completely.

Pam wants to meet you, wants to know your story, wants to hang out with you as long as you care to, and she wants to welcome you into her family.

Heroic Public Speaking

The final example I’ll point to is Michael and Amy Port’s Heroic Public Speaking. Heroic Public Speaking a brand of speaking and performance training that Michael and Amy offer to seasoned and fledgling speakers around the world.

I have known Michael for many years and been exposed to their training sessions on six or seven occasions. Watching them work with speakers is both inspirational and somewhat mesmerizing. It is a rare leadership gift to be able to honestly tell someone what they are doing wrong and at the same time make them feel so cared for.

Members of the HPS family support and help each other on their journey to become better speakers and some of the biggest names in the speaking industry fall all over themselves to contribute to this community in any way possible.

If you are not a part of one or more of these communities, set a goal for 2017 – go to WDS, visit Pam at K’é, and join the HPS community in some fashion.

So what makes each these tick?

The obvious thread is this – These are online communities that allow people to connect more deeply through offline human interaction. Members cheer for each other and embrace each other with every chance they get.

In all three examples, the leaders are the fire starters, but community members advance the flame.

But, I would like to suggest that the magic in these communities comes from something that goes unnoticed and most members can’t articulate.

The magic is not in what Chris, Pam, and Amy and Michael do – the magic lies in what happens to people when they do it.

The magic is not in what Chris, Pam, and Amy and Michael do – the magic lies in what happens to people when they do it.

I can’t tell you how to bottle this, but I do know that all strong communities have this in common – Transformation, over information and inspiration, is the ultimate focus.

We all love good information, we are drawn to those who inspire, but we thirst for transformative experiences with ever fiber of our being and every dollar in our wallet.

So, let’s apply that to you – The magic in building your community lies not in what you do, but in what happens to people when you do it.

Work with that idea.

Focus your efforts on transforming people’s lives rather than spreading your knowledge and your community will flourish.

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

]]>https://builtbybooks.com/2016/11/04/50-ways-to-become-an-expert-and-boost-your-sales/
Fri, 04 Nov 2016 22:18:49 +0000morganprovincehttps://builtbybooks.com/2016/11/04/50-ways-to-become-an-expert-and-boost-your-sales/As a new freelancer, one of the toughest things so far has been proving myself as a competent human being.

Okay, maybe people know that I am competent. But seriously, it is hard to show the world my talent and potential when I have only worked for a large company in my career. All of my work was confidential or for internal use only, so putting past projects in my professional portfolio is a no-go.

What am I supposed to do?

A couple of years ago when I was working in sales, I came across the book Duct Tape Selling: Think Like a Marketer – Sell Like a Superstar by John Jantsch. Naturally, the sales title interested me, but the book is a wealth of amazing knowledge about becoming an authority in your field, marketing yourself as such and selling the heck out of your product/service.

Little did I know, I would be revisiting this book years later to help me establish a freelance career!

Becoming an expert and marketing yourself can happen simultaneously. When people look you up or ask about you, what will they find? Is it the information you want? If not, use the tactics below to create the brand image you want your audience to see.

Add Value

Show people what you can do. Help your potential clients before they even start paying for it. People remember and respect you if you can teach them something new, something valuable. There are tons of platforms that allow you to demonstrate your value; you just need to the choose the platforms on which your audience already spend time.

Where and how you can add value:

Create a blog

Write for news organizations

Write a book or eBook

Design worksheets and workbooks

Host an email or online course

Create a tutorial or how-to guide

Host an AMA (ask me anything)

Mentor someone who is new or learning in your field

Answer questions in online forums such as Reddit, Yahoo! Answers and Quora

Offer insights and solutions when people in your professional Facebook groups ask for them

Write reviews for resources in your area of expertise

Conduct research or an experiment and write up your results

Provide a round-up of the best resources for your tribe

Join a group board on Pinterest

Be Visible

People are more likely to trust you if they can imagine working with you. You need to get your name, business and face in front of your potential clients.

Ways to get visible include:

Speaking at events

Guest lecturing in classes

Creating videos

Live streaming

Hosting webinars

Appearing on television, in online videos and on podcasts

Hosting a chat on Twitter, Reddit or Google

Partnering with an expert in an adjacent field

Mentioning mentors and other experts in your work if they have helped or inspired you; they may show their audience your praise

Optimizing SEO on your website

Getting professional headshots and portraits taken

Use a hashtag popular with your tribe on Instagram and/or Twitter

Network, Network, Network

Surely this is not the first time you have heard how important networking is. No, your success will not completely depend on who you know, but you can enrich and accelerate your success by connecting with the right people.

One tool that will be invaluable as you network? Business cards. For less than $15 you can order them online, an investment that is well worth your money.

Ways to network:

Find a relevant Meetup

Attend the meeting of a professional organization

Join a local organization, Chamber of Commerce or business group

Host Skype coffee dates

Invite others in your field to a Google Hangout

Create a mastermind with others in our field

Start a club or regular event

Host an online summit where you bring in other experts in your field and adjacent fields

Join social media groups, like Facebook groups, where other professionals in similar fields hang out

Ramp up your LinkedIn account and reach out to other professionals

Become a member of a professional hub or shared office space

Enroll in a local class or program in your field

Join a gym or fitness class

Volunteer

Do a group activity that involves one of your hobbies

Build a Community

Once you have begun to put your expertise out there in the universe, you need to build a community. This community becomes your tribe, attracts your ideal clients and allows past clients to become your evangelists. Your community is a place where your tribe can interact with you and each other. One example of this that has gained popularity in the past year is a Facebook group, for good reason. As an expert, you will have access to thousands of people in your tribe on a free platform with a low threshold to join.

More examples of ways to create your community:

Building an email list and sending emails

Sending a newsletter

Running an Instagram account

Running a Pinterest account

Sharing photos on SnapChat

Communicating in a group texting app like WhatsApp, Viber or GroupMe

Running a giveaway or contest

Creating a client referral system

Creating an MVP/VIP loyalty program

Give a TEDTalk

For more exercises to display your work, check out my new free eBook called, The Portfolio Builder! This issue is filled with ways to tell a story to an audience. If you need to bulk up your portfolio, choose one (or all!) of the exercises! Sign up for this free resource and many others HERE.

Geofencing and Your Small Business

Geofencing is a location-based mobile service that allows businesses to send notifications to smartphone users within a specified geographical area. It is widely utilized as a marketing tool to directly engage potential customers in the area by sending promotions and information straight to the consumer’s phone. Because small businesses are typically less well known by consumers than big brand names, geofencing is a particularly useful tool to help grow your business. Here’s what you should know about growing your business with geofencing tools.

First Things First… How Does Geofencing Work?

Geofencing technology draws a virtual perimeter around real-life geographic places. This geographic “fencing” can be custom drawn so that it is around the perimeter of a business or within a preset square mile perimeter of a business or location. This technology uses location-based services to track when someone enters or exits the geographic perimeter you have set for your geofencing campaign. This, in turn, triggers the alert/advertisement to the user’s smartphone about your business.

It Brings in Customers

Geofencing sends ads, sales, and promotions straight to smartphone users within the area of your business. According to statistics from Plotprojects, geofencing increases app usage by over 200%, leading to high customer engagement and an increased probability of making a sale. In addition, geofencing’s click-through rate is fifteen times higher than that of normal push notifications. This means that geofencing notifications are proven to increase the amount of people who actually click on the promotional notification your business sends them. Because big businesses have the advantage of being well-known to consumers, geofencing can be a huge advantage to small businesses looking to increase consumer awareness of their brand.

It’s a Cost Efficient Way to Market

Not only does geofencing provide a business with perfect marketing timing, but it is also incredibly cost efficient advertising. Most small businesses don’t have a huge budget for marketing and advertising, yet still need these tools in order to grow their business. Geofencing doesn’t break the budget because a small business can create their own marketing channel rather than paying for one through an advertising or marketing agency. Using geofencing allows small businesses to directly compete with big businesses for a fraction of the price. Whatever the budget is, there is a wide range of options that any small business can afford.

Customers Actually Want Geofencing Notifications

Consumers are constantly bombarded by advertising and marketing clutter. USA Today reports that the average person is exposed to 3,000 to 5,000 ads per day. The common assumption has become that people don’t want any more ads and would become annoyed receiving ads straight to their mobile device. Recent studies have busted this myth, concluding that 70% of consumers think geofencing notifications are valuable and 53% are likely to engage with the advertisement.

Getting Strategically Creative

Geofencing can be much more creative than simply sending out notifications to consumers in the area of your business. The trick is that businesses are not limited to using their own locations when purchasing and setting a geofencing area. This allows small businesses to target consumers in creative locations that relate to their business. Biznessapps offers the example in which a small wedding planning business could purchase geofencing around wedding-related venues that could trigger notification ads for the business when potential customers are touring venues. If your business if feeling particularly strategic, you could even set up your geofencing area around your competitor’s business. When customers move near your competitor, they’ll receive a discount, special sale, or general information notification for your business instead, which could drive traffic away from your competitor and directly toward your own business. Because geofencing possibilities are endless, small businesses can get creative to open up new opportunities.

Geofencing is an incredibly useful marketing and advertising tool. This technique helps businesses to individually target consumers in strategic geographical areas of interest with enticing offers such as sales, promotions, and information about their business. Geofencing is even more useful for small businesses looking to increase business and customer awareness because of its budget flexibility and easy consumer targeting practices.

Alen Malkoc, CEO of Optyn, claims, “With local small businesses, location is the most significant driver of converting and acquiring customers…The key focus should be to reach the right customer, and in order to do that, start with location as the No. 1 factor.”

Whether your business is just getting off the ground or is opening up its hundredth location, geofencing can exponentially help to build any business.

Popular Geofencing Platforms for Small Businesses

Below are some companies that offer Geofencing services for businesses. Explore each to discover their unique capabilities. Please note that we are not associated with the following organizations in any way.

Rachel Jones is the marketing assistant at Enola Labs. Enola Labs is an engineering focused web and mobile app development company based in Austin, Texas. For more related content, follow Enola Labs on Twitter and Facebook.

Back in the day, people used to sign up for an email list for anything. Just offer an eBook and you could see your sign up rate growing rapidly. This strategy will still work; however, it is not as effective as it used to be.

Since more and more publishers are offering generic opt-in bribes such as eBooks, it’s hard to differentiate yours from the rest. And unless you offer something that stands out, chances are people will automatically ignore them.

In this post, I’ll explain two effective strategies to skyrocket your email list.

Many marketers focus solely on growing their email list and undervalue the importance of building a relationship with their leads.

In fact, did you know that an average email subscriber gets 416 commercial emails per month? That means every day, 13+ commercial emails are competing with each other to get noticed by your subscriber.

As an email marketer, if you didn’t create a strongly bonded relationship with your subscribers, it is highly likely that your subscribers tend to ignore your emails, which in turn makes your list less effective when it comes to converting your leads to customers.

How do you grow your email list and build a strongly bonded relationship simultaneously?

Content gating is one such innovative approach. With content gating, you can provide high-value content on your website behind an opt-in form, so your readers are forced to register on your website by submitting their email address in order to access the content.

As there is more unique content behind the gate, your leads often return to your website in order to access it.

Example: Copyblogger

When it comes to growing an email list, the team at Copyblogger didn’t trust the traditional way of offering an eBook or a newsletter as an opt-in bribe. They wanted to offer something more unique that would not only help to increase the perceived and actual value of their offer, but would also help them build a long lasting relationship with the Copyblogger brand.

So they decided to offer premium content called “MyCopyblogger” behind an opt-in form as gated content.

MyCopyblogger consists of15 eBooks and a 20-part internet marketing course, so each time when subscribers access the content on their website, they’ll have to log into it.

And the result was pretty astonishing. This strategy of offering gated content not only helped them to grow their email list by 400%, but also made $300,000 in ‘Authority’ sales in their first month because it was connected to their paywall.

The main benefit of creating a premium content library is that, unlike offering a free eBook in return for an email address, it ensures that the quality of the leads remains high. In the case of Copyblogger, they found that aside from the landing page, their most viewed page lies behind the paywall. That means on a regular basis, leads are returning to their website to access the content.

Should you gate content?

It depends on your content strategy.

If your strategy is to drive more traffic and build backlinks to your website, content gating may not be a great idea for you. On the contrary, if you’re looking to grow and nurture your email list, gated content could the right choice.

In fact, websites like Unbounce uses a combination of both free and gated content. You can freely access their Landing Page Optimization course whereas some of their more advanced content is gated like webinars and eBooks.

How to gate content?

One of the easiest ways to create a premium content library is by repurposing your existing content. All you need to do is to repurpose your killer blog posts to create premium content that lies behind the paywall.

Create a membership site: If you’re on WordPress, install the Membership 2 plugin on your website. This will ensure that only your subscribers will have access to your content library.

Create a landing page: Create an awesome landing page to grow your list. If you’re not a good landing page designer, either hire an expert to create it or install any landing page plugins on your site. In your landing page, make sure to create beautiful opt-in forms, so it encourages more sign ups. If you’re looking for a free plugin, Optin forms could be the right choice.

Track the on-site behavior: As your leads will be returning to your website often, one of the main benefits of creating a gated content library is that the lifetime value of your leads will be high. So make sure you install the free Leadin plugin to better understand the on-site behavior of your leads, which can be helpful for your business in the long run.

Send personalized emails: Learning the on-site behavior of your leads helps you send personalized emails to your customers, which are more likely to convert a prospect into a customer.

Skyrocket your email list overnight with content upgrades

Content upgrades are lead magnets you offer within your article to encourage visitors to subscribe to your list. Unlike the usual opt-in offers, which giveaway generic resources such as eBooks, content upgrades are created specifically for specific pages to offer exactly what visitors want at the moment.

For example, if your blog post talks about weight loss, you can offer an eBook that is closely related to weight loss from that post in return to their email address.

That means content upgrades are laser targeted resources, crafted specifically to meet the needs of your visitors at a particular time, and are not a generic opt-in bribe like what you would usually offer from the sidebar of your blog.

It is usually placed inside the content area of your posts or the pages, so it easily grabs the attention of your visitors and encourages more visitors to subscribe to the list.

Content upgrades- examples

Brian Dean from Backlinko decided to see if giving away a post-specific resource as content upgrade would increase conversion on his one of the most visited blog posts.

Before the test, the page was converting at 0.54%. When he started using content upgrade on his blog post, he found a 785% increase in conversion rate in just a single day, and he gained this result without conducting any A/B testing. Needless to say, that’s a massive increase.

How to create a content upgrade?

Step 1: Create a resource like an eBook specifically for your blog post and offer it for free when they subscribe to your list.

Step 2: Install any content upgrade plugin on your website. This will help you create content-specific bonuses that your visitors have to opt in for. When visitors click a link on your blog post, a pop up will appear asking them to submit their email address in order to access the resource you created in step one. Once the email address is submitted, the user can access the content.

Step 3: Create a Google Analytics goal and analyze if this strategy is actually bringing in more sign ups.

Summary

Many email marketers are offering free ebooks and newsletters as an opt-in bribe in return to email addresses. Though there is nothing wrong with offering such bribes, there are many other ways to grow your list massively.

Content library: For creating a premium content library, you don’t need to create the content from scratch. If you’ve already written and published epic blog posts, all you need to do is to repurpose them to a premium content library and encourage sign ups in order to access it.

Content upgrade: Unlike the usual opt-in giveaways, content upgrade provides exactly what a user need at the moment, because they are created specifically for each blog post. As the resource you offer is highly-targeted, it skyrockets the sign up rate.

Which one is your favorite opt-in bribe? Share your thoughts with us by dropping a line below.

Shahzad Saeed is specialized in content marketing for small businesses. He offers blogging, guest blogging and ghostwriting services. You can hire him for your freelance writing project.

Michael is a master of online marketing. Over 20 years ago, he identified an opportunity in a growing trend, the white paper. He perfected the art of distributing content and quickly established himself as a leader in this market. Fast forward to today, Mike’s content on Social Media Examiner is followed by millions nation-wide and he’s a respected influencer of all things marketing.

Questions I ask Michael Stelzner:

On Facebook Live is there a way to have multiple participants that are not in the same room?

Do you recommend using a microphone, other than the native iPhone microphone?

Is live-streaming a useful tool for events and conferences? Will we see it at the Social Media Marketing World Conference in March 2017?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

What the difference is between Facebook Live, Snapchat and Instagram Stories and how to effectively use each of these channels

How innovation and technology are changing the ways of social media and live-streaming, as well as some great suggestions that will help you implement these strategies

What the limits and legalities are in terms of live-streaming and how to produce great live-stream content while complying with these standards

Learn more about Michael Stelzner and Social Media Examiner here. To learn more about the social media event of the year, the Social Media Marketing World Conference, click here.

This week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is brought to you by magicJack for BUSINESS, trusted by a quarter million small businesses. Reliable phone service at an incredible price: plans from just $14.99/month per line – flat. Get two months FREE service when you sign up at http://ift.tt/2dEnE42. The first 100 listeners will receive a FREE IP phone for every line (each an $85 value)!